


my battery is low (and it’s getting dark)

by niltia



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Angst, Episode Tag, Epistolary, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-16
Updated: 2019-02-16
Packaged: 2019-10-29 09:58:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17805887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/niltia/pseuds/niltia
Summary: Episode tag for s02e05, Saints of Imperfection.





	my battery is low (and it’s getting dark)

**Author's Note:**

> Title inspired by [this tumblr post](https://trek-tracks.tumblr.com/post/182797101018/).

Hugh expects to disappear. He expects that when Paul wakes up in the real world, he himself will just cease existing. But oblivion never comes. 

Hugh doesn’t have control of his surroundings the way Paul seemed to, to some extent. The moment Paul leaves, the clothes Hugh is wearing shift back to what he’d been wearing when he… entered the network, he supposes, without him even noticing. 

When it sinks in that, functionally, he’s stranded on an unknown world, he takes stock of what he has available to him. It’s not much of anything. He’s got the uniform he was wearing when he died, the tricorder that was holstered on his thigh, and that’s basically it. He has no food and no water, and no idea what around him could be a source of either one. The habitat he’s in is entirely alien to him. 

The tricorder would at least be helpful under normal circumstances, if this was a normal planet, where he’d be able to use its built in instrumentation to identify potential toxins in the plant material around him and poisonous gases in the air and pathogens in the water and where anything it couldn’t identify, it could communicate to the ship’s computer for further analysis. But here, everything he points it at comes back as “unexpected error” and “invalid parameters” and “connection lost.” Even himself, when he turns the instrument on his own hand, trying to diagnose whether the problem is the tricorder or the place itself. He’s not sure what to make of that. 

Pretty much the only function that _does_ still work as designed on the device is the recording function. It makes sense. The medical staff record notes about patient visits and procedures verbally, and those are probably stored locally before being synchronized to the library computer for transcription when the session is complete. 

-  
 _  
Officer’s log, stardate 1324.9._

_I have been stranded in an unknown location with no supplies and no way of communicating with the Discovery. I had thought that I was… well. To be frank, I had thought that I was dead and that some element of my, uh, consciousness, whatever term is appropriate, had been trapped in the mycelial network._

_However, as I’m still here and the location I’m in does seem to be a tangible physical place, I’m unsure about my previous conclusions._

_The only items I have in my possession are the uniform I’m wearing, which I suppose is a minor blessing, and the tricorder I was using as part of my job duties at the time I was, ah, transported here. The tricorder appears to be minimally functional and is incapable of identifying whether any of the native flora are suitable for human consumption. Pretty much all it can do is record, really, as far as I can tell._

_I have no food and no water. I’m going to continue exploring in hopes that I encounter some sort of river or other body of water. I’ll decide how to proceed from there.  
_  
-

Hugh decides to put off eating or drinking anything he finds here for as long as possible because while both starvation and dehydration will kill him, an unknown poison might kill him faster.

Then he realizes he doesn’t feel hungry or thirsty. At all.

-  
 __  
Officer’s log, stardate… unknown.

_I still haven’t tried eating anything and I’m not particularly inclined to. I’ve been walking around for, uh, quite a while. Everything looks pretty much the same. There are areas where the flora are denser or sparser, but no geological or aquatic features I can identify. The terrain seems pretty flat._

_I think I’ve identified four different plant species and maybe two fungal species? Not that I know what any of them are, for the most part. One of them is definitely_ Prototaxites stellaviatori _, God knows I’ve had to fish Paul out of that cultivation bay enough times to recognize that one on sight… anyway._

_I suppose if I get desperate enough, that one is technically edible in that it’s not particularly toxic in small quantities. But it’s also highly psychotropic and I have no desire to be out of touch with my surroundings while in an unknown and potentially dangerous environment._

_I’ve also seen some strange clouds of light through the trees a couple times, but I’m not sure if that’s insects or some kind of dust or atmospheric effect._

_[several seconds of silence]_

_I’m not sure how long I’ve been here, but I really think I should have felt tired by now.  
_  
-

He feels like he’s starting to lose it a little bit when little green lights he’s seen around start landing on him. It’s like a fine layer of fluorescent dust has gently floated down and decided to coat a patch of his sleeve. He hasn’t gotten close to the glowing clouds he’s seen in the distance, unsure what they were, but this one seemed like it had almost sought him out.

He brings his arm up to look at it more closely. It’s still moving around on his sleeve, so it’s not a cloud of dust, at any rate. Some kind of minuscule lightning bug, maybe?

Then it starts to sting. The sensation reminds him of the time he found a hole in the ground swarming with ladybugs while on a botany field trip during academy. He had submerged his hand in it to see if they would land on him. It turned out ladybugs don’t bite, per say, but they do like eating salt. 

He hastily brushes off the little green flecks and shakes them off of his hand when they cling. Where they had settled, there are now holes in the fabric of his uniform. It’s pretty thick fabric. They weren’t on him for very long.

He keeps walking.

\-   
_  
I’m getting really tired of walking, but the moment I sit down, these things land on me. I mean, I’m not actually tired. But I feel like I’ve been walking for days, maybe I have been walking for days, and I just want to sit down for a bit.  
_  
-

Eventually Hugh decides, just, the hell with it, and he sits down anyway. He finds one of the weird tree-like things that has a little bit of a thicker trunk than most and leans back against it, just having a rest. He’ll just sit here for a bit. Who cares if the weird green lights eat all his clothes? It’s not like it matters, as far as he can tell. There’s no wind here, he hasn’t felt the least bit hot or cold, there’s nobody around to see him. If someone somehow comes to rescue him and he’s completely naked, his nudity is going to be the last thing on his mind.

He sits for a bit, leans his head back against the tree trunk and stares up into the weird opaque sky. It looks like a child’s painting of a nebula. He tries to relax for a moment, to calm down, since he’s been on edge and on the move for who knows how long and that kind of prolonged stress is detrimental to mental acuity, he knows. He’s increasingly certain that he’s going to have to be his own rescuer here and the sharper he stays the better. He’s already starting to feel loopy from his inability to sleep.

As he sits there, the weird ladybug-bite sensation as the light-bugs eat his clothes starts to get itchy. And then it starts to get painful. He jumps up from where he’s sitting and starts brushing them off himself, and what he sees tells him he’s not going to get another chance at rest for a while.

-  
 __  
So this godforsaken place is trying to eat me, it turns out. It’s great! I guess I’m never going to sleep again! Not that I was going to anyway, because I’m apparently not alive enough to need to sleep!

_[strangled laughter]_

_Because I’m dead!  
_  
-

It’s shortly after this that he sees the Discovery actually jump through the network the first time. That’s also the first time he really truly accepts that that’s the hellscape where he’s been stranded. He knew, of course, but some delusional part of him had maybe hoped he was just stranded on a bizarre alien planet somehow. But no. Nobody is coming for him. His would-be rescuers, at least aside from brief traversals, aren’t even in the same _universe_. 

The Discovery is only there for a few seconds, but its entrance and exit are both impossible to miss. If he had somehow managed to sleep, this would have woken him up. The ship enters and exits the atmosphere with not so much a noise as the sensation of all the air around him being sucked into a vacuum and then released. It briefly skims low over the canopy of the almost-forest and then is gone again. The ship itself is nearly translucent, all the interior workings exposed to his sight like a strange wireframe model, except for one area near the center that seems to be radiating a bright white light. Its appearance is so sudden that he doesn’t have the chance to process what he’s seeing, let alone examine it any further, before it’s already gone. 

-  
 _  
Okay. So. Obviously I was struggling a little bit last time I talked to you. But I’m okay! And I figured something out, too. I realized that, although these things got me pretty good while I was sitting down, nothing touched my back where I was leaning against that tree. I wasn’t sure if that was just because they couldn’t get to it, because, you know, they were physically blocked, but they also aren’t eating the trees for whatever reason and they seem to be fine with eating synthetic fabric, so I tried something._

_I know it was a little risky, who knows whether these trees produce any compounds that are toxic to humans or what fungus might be growing in the bark, but at this point sporotrichosis is probably the least of my concerns. It seems like these little bugs really do not want to eat the bark of these trees, so I’ve been using it to keep them away. It doesn’t feel_ great _to be rubbing a natural exfoliant all over my body constantly, but it feels a hell of a lot better than getting_ eaten alive _. So._

_Wow, I really hope nobody ever finds this. Who am I kidding, that’s not going to happen anyway.  
_  
-

The Discovery appears with increasing frequency after that. It takes some intense study over a couple of jumps and one really lucky placement where he ends up right under the path of the ship, but eventually he realizes that the bright light he can see must be the reaction cube from the spore drive bay. He tells himself that he can almost make out Paul standing in it, but he knows that’s delusional.

Speaking of delusional, that’s not the only place he’s seeing Paul.

It had started almost innocuously, faint impressions of a voice mixed in with the bizarre windless rustling of the flora here. He’s not concerned at first. Even in anechoic chambers, the human brain tries to discern reason out of chaos. He knows he’s alone here. 

But the voice continues, becomes more intelligible, more recognizable, and Hugh thinks about the fact that he has now probably been awake for longer than any other human has ever been. At least and survived, that is. In this particular instance, it has probably been to his advantage that he’s not technically _alive_. He braces himself for the other sleep deprivation symptoms he knows are coming. Honestly he’s lucky it hasn’t happened earlier. 

-  
 _  
I keep seeing you here, Paul. I know it’s not real. I know I’m alone. But I feel like I’ve been here for months and nothing feels real anymore and sometimes my hallucinations of you feel more real than anything else here.  
_  
-

The longer he’s here, the more actively hostile the environment around him becomes. He spends a lot of time just on the move, refreshing the caked-on layer of ground up bark with which he’s coated his now-filthy uniform and every exposed inch of skin.

He’s pretty sure that the little green light-bugs are sentient. He also no longer thinks they’re bugs. They look more like the glowing blue spores he’d seen in Paul’s fungal forest on the ship, on the one occasion he dares to trap one and try to examine it more closely. There are no external features, no carapace or wings or any other structure he can make out when he squints at it, just a tiny nondescript point of bioluminescence. He lets it go when it starts to dissolve his fingertips. 

He knows he’s not making rational decisions anymore, not thinking clearly, and that he’s hallucinating a lot of the time. But he doesn’t think he’s hallucinating the fact that the spores are actively chasing him, that they move in concert with one another to try to herd him into impassable areas and corner him, that they swarm between him and the trees to try to block him from getting access to more bark. 

It’s been a hard enough task to stay alive when the environment was just passively trying to kill him. Now that he’s aware there’s intent, the problem of prolonging his own existence feels insurmountable.

-  
 __  
I made a mistake, Paul. I was talking to you, well, a hallucination of you, I guess, and I got too caught up in it and I stood still for a little too long.

_They got me pretty good. My leg. It’s going to make it a lot harder to walk around, to keep moving. Honestly, I don’t know how I didn’t notice it as it was happening, but it’s hard to stay lucid most of the time, so. It’s not great, Paul._

_I’m not sure how much longer I’m going to —_

_[beep]  
_  
-

Hugh looks down at the tricorder in confusion. It’s hard to focus through the pain in his leg, but he brushes some of the bark off the screen of the device and holds it up to his face in the dim light.

_LOW BATTERY_ , it reads.

Huh.

Hugh’s obviously not an idiot, he knows that electronic devices require a source of electrical power, but he’s so accustomed to always having a tricorder on hand while on (and frequently while off) duty that he hadn’t really thought about the fact that they get cycled through the charging station on a monthly basis. The cycling is really more to ensure that wear and tear on all the devices is distributed evenly, more than anything else, since their battery life is so long. The only other time he’s seen one give a warning like this was when it was malfunctioning.

He must have been here a very, very long time now. 

-  
 __  
If anybody finds this, I’m definitely dead, but don’t worry about it. I always was. Anyway, if you find this, my name is Hugh Culber and I was a Starfleet doctor and the most recent year in real time, for me, was 2256. My next of kin is Lieutenant Paul Stamets, also in Starfleet. Please give this to him. If he’s dead too, please find Dr. Cynthia Culber, who is probably on Earth. If she’s dead, well… it doesn’t really matter who you give this to, I guess. Anyway. Thanks.  
  
-

He covers the tricorder in another layer of crushed-up bark and buries it in the matted detritus at the base of one of the trees. He knows it’s pointless, but it makes him feel better. It makes him feel a little bit less like he’s breaking down. It makes him feel a little bit less like he’s about to disappear.


End file.
